Did NIL kill the March Cinderella in the NCAA Tournament?

On Friday, every single favorite on the board in the NCAA Tournament won OUTRIGHT. It also marked the second straight year where every team seeded 13 through 16 in the NCAA Tournament went winless in the first round.

That has now happened back to back for the first time since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. Look at the chart. From 2008 through 2024, only two years produced zero upsets from the 13 through 16 seeds.

We just did it twice in a row. 2025 and 2026 are both red and while it’s only two years, it’s also not a blip. We’re trending towards…well, a trend, and I don’t like it all.

NCAA Tournament 13-16 seeds to win a first round game since 2008:

Teams seeded 13 through 16 to win a first round game in the men's NCAA Tournament since 2008: pic.twitter.com/quequRN2Rw

— Sports TV News & Updates (@TVSportsUpdates) March 21, 2026

Here’s what used to happen in the NCAA Tournament:

• In 2012 alone, Lehigh, Norfolk State, and Ohio all won first round games.
• In 2013 it was FGCU, Harvard, and La Salle.
• In 2016 it was Middle Tennessee, Stephen F. Austin, and Hawaii.
• 2018 gave us UMBC over Virginia, the only 16 over 1 in tournament history.
• In 2021 Oral Roberts, Abilene Christian, Ohio, and North Texas all won.

The bracket used to produce magic on a near-annual basis. The last two years it has produced nothing from those seeds. Not one win.

There were competitive games this year. Mid-majors pushed several teams to the wire and the final scores made some of those matchups look worse than they were on the floor. It genuinely felt better than last year but the scoreboard does not give partial credit and the trend is undeniable. The only major upset was really High Point over Wisconsin with a classic 12 seed over a five.

Chase Johnston makes first two-pointer of the year, High Point upsets fifth seed Wisconsin 83-82 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament

NCAA Tournament suffering at the hands of NIL?

Before NIL, you could build a mid-major program around five guys who played together for four years. Three of those starters would have been major conference quality players in a different recruiting cycle but fell through the cracks, landed at a smaller school, developed together, and by year three or four they were battle-tested in a way that a talented but younger major conference team simply could not match.

That is how you got UMBC. That is how you got Saint Peter’s. That is how you got FGCU dancing. Those runs were built on cohesion, experience, and the reality that good players had no real mechanism to leave.

That world is gone. The moment a player at a mid-major shows he can compete at the next level, a bag shows up and he transfers.

The three guys who would have stayed four years and built something are now sophomores at power conference schools, making the gap between major programs and everyone else wider than it has ever been.

In 2012, a guy who fell through the cracks in recruiting would spend four years at a mid-major and develop into a real player. In 2026, he trickles up to a power program by his sophomore year and the mid-major never gets to see what he becomes.

The hard truth is that college sports was probably more entertaining to watch in 2010 but it was built on a model that unambiguously exploited athletes who could not profit from their name or image and were punished for transferring.

NIL fixed that injustice. Players get paid now. Cream rises to the top. The problem is that what made March Madness genuinely magical for two decades was largely a product of that same broken system.

The Cinderella story was real. It was also built on athletes being underpaid and trapped. Now that they are not, the bracket looks like this.

Two red rows in a row. That is a genuinely uncomfortable thing to sit with and it does not have a clean resolution.

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